Five Days After Disclosure, Mountain House Tied to Missing "Awakening Retreat" Pair Remains Empty
Police searching the mountains around a rented house tied to a self-development group's "awakening retreat" have deployed roughly 140 personnel in total over five days, but have found no leads on the two people in their twenties who went missing after attending. The individual named on the house's lease cannot be confirmed to exist, and the landlord says he never met the person face to face.
Police searching the mountains around the rented house tied to the group's "awakening retreat" have deployed roughly 140 personnel in total since late August, covering a roughly two-kilometer radius of mountain trails and streambeds around the property. As of the 6th, no new evidence or sightings had turned up. "The wider we expand the search area, the thinner the leads get," the officer coordinating the search said. "All we can do is work through each reported sighting one by one."
As previously reported, the lease on the house expired at the end of August. The landlord, 72, spoke to this paper again, saying the contract had been arranged two years ago through a broker the group had introduced, and that he had never met the named tenant in person. "It was all phone calls and paperwork. It came through an older acquaintance, so I didn't think anything was off." When the landlord checked the name on the lease again, he found no trace of it in residency records, and police have likewise been unable to confirm the person exists. The broker's registration lapsed at the end of last year, and its contact number is no longer in service.
A different former member of the group, in their twenties, spoke to this paper on condition of anonymity. According to this person, a participant in a retreat held last year also failed to return for several days past the scheduled end, an absence explained at the time as the person having decided to "stay a little longer, taken by the mountain air." "Looking back now, maybe the same thing happened then," the former member said. No record beyond this person's memory supports the account, and police are proceeding cautiously in assessing whether it bears any connection to the current case. Whether it does, and what actually happened either time, remains unresolved.
TDA has not changed its position, previously stated, that "the concept of 'returning to the shore' that this group asserts corresponds to nothing in this agency's observational record." The municipal consumer affairs center announced on the 6th that it had consolidated inquiries related to sensitivity-development schemes into a dedicated line. "Inquiries have risen because of this case," an official said. "The only way to prevent a next one is to catch more people before they sign anything."
As previously reported, police are examining the group with possible violations of the Specified Commercial Transactions Act in view, but any prosecution requires first identifying the group's actual operators, and as of the 6th neither a name nor a location for its representative has been confirmed. "If the party to the contract doesn't actually exist, we stall right at the entrance — who exactly to name as a suspect," an investigative source said. "Whether it's a borrowed name or a fabricated one from the start is something we can only work out from there." Testimony exists, as previously reported, about the group's tiered fee structure and its internal rule against contradicting members' accounts of "seeing," but the group itself has offered no explanation of any kind.
The families of the two missing people have still not spoken to press. Relaying a message through the search command, a police officer said only, "They've asked that this wait until there's something to tell." Results from the analysis of the seized candle holders had not been released as of the 6th, and the case entered its sixth day unresolved, alongside the still-unexplained nature of the group itself.
